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Doctorow Tears Up ISP Contract Over Net Neutrality
Burz writes "As a reaction to Virgin Media CEO's promise to violate the concept of net neutrality, Cory Doctorow is declaring his ISP contract void, canceling the service, and calling on other Virgin customers to do the same. He isn't alone. Charlie Stross counts the ways the gang that became Virgin Media is trashing Sir Richard's brand. Myself, I am thinking of stopping my Virgin Mobile service in protest."
Thats nice if there is more than 1 broadband option where you live.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow
Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Trotskyist teachers, Doctorow was raised in an activist household, working in the nuclear disarmament movement and as a Greenpeace campaigner as a child. He later served on the board of directors for the Grindstone Island Co-operative on Big Rideau Lake in Ontario, helping to run a conference center devoted to peace and social justice education and activist training. He received his high school diploma from SEED School, a free school in Toronto, and dropped out of four universities without attaining a degree.
Doctorow moved to Los Angeles, California in mid-2006 from London, England, where he had worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for four years, helping to set up the Open Rights Group, before quitting to pursue writing full-time in January 2006. Upon his departure, Doctorow was named a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Doctorow spent the 2006-2007 academic year teaching as a visiting professor at the University of Southern California, despite not holding any academic degree. He then returned to London. He is a frequent public speaker on copyright issues.
Doctorow's daughter with Alice Taylor, Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, was born on 3 February 2008.
Cory's parents have suggested that he is related to author E.L. Doctorow, but E.L. Doctorow himself could not confirm or deny the family connection.
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Don't know, sounds like someone I'd care about...
Article 82 - abuse of a dominant position.
A82 is directly enforceable in the national courts. VM has a dominant position in the UK broadband market - this is an automatic presumption in the cable market as their share is 100%, and, based on the structure of the UK backbone-network, a reasonable and fair assumption regarding broadband in general.
they are acting in a manor that can only be said to be taking unfair advantage of their position to the detriment of the broadband market in general - and they are doing this independently of us the consumer: ie: we get this crap and there is absolutely nothing we can do.
whilst having a dominant market share, and being in a monopolist position is _not_ illegal - abusing this position is. VM are starting a consumer/isp war that the consumers cannot win. they are abusing the technological development of the UK's broadband system by prejudicing our use in a way we cannot avoid. an utterly artificial creation.
as VM own the cable network, there is no cross elastic supply. the consumer is lacked into contracts which generally fall foul of elastic demand the moment they abuse their position. the good news is that no VM customer is bound to their unfair contracts that stifle the advancement of uk broadband - be it traffic shaping or whatnot.
vote with your wallets - sign up to another ISP!
It's not actually Branson's company, he just (foolishly) licensed the brand to NTL Telewest so they could use it.
Unfortunately, it's not vandalism. (sorry, posted this under the wrong comment earlier...then Slashdot wouldn't let me post a reply to your comment because the comment ID wasn't found...)
He wears a red cape and blogs from a high-altitude balloon.
My UID is a prime number. Yeah, I planned that.
Except that what Virgin wants isn't tiered pricing. I look at net neutrality analogously to UPS delivery. UPS doesn't care who you are, or who you're shipping to, or what (modulo hazardous materials) you're shipping. They care about basically two things and two things only: how big/heavy your package is, and how far you're shipping it. If you and I both go in to the same UPS office to ship the same package to two recipients in the same city, UPS will charge us both the same price. Sure I'll pay more if I pick overnight shipping and you pick standard ground, but if I pick the same shipping as you I won't get nicked for more.
What Virgin wants, though, isn't anything analogous. Suppose the situation is that I'm buying mail-order, and as the customer I've paid the shipping charge for overnight delivery. What Virgin wants is to go to the merchant and go "We know your customer paid for overnight shipping. But if you, Mr. Merchant, don't cross our palm with some extra money on top of that, we won't deliver the package overnight. Oh, and don't think you can just stop offering overnight shipping, because if you ship standard we'll slow that down too unless you pay us.". This is known as "a kickback", and in every other field it gets you in legal trouble. For my money, I'm not willing to do business with someone who's demanding kickbacks.
Most of us geeks would have no problem with Virgin charging their customers tiered pricing based on how much those customers used. We'd probably take our business somewhere that offered a better deal, but Virgin would at least be being honest. Virgin, though, seems to want to extort kickbacks from people who aren't it's customers so that they don't have to charge their customers based on usage. Sorry, but no.
He started Boing Boing.
Doctorow didn't even start Boing Boing, Mark Frauenfelder and Carla Sinclair did. He wasn't even on board when it went from a 'zine to a web site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boing_Boing#History
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)